Residents seek new consultant for Carlsbad's Ponto report

BARBARA HENRY - Staff Writer

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CARLSBAD -- South Carlsbad residents who are fighting
development plans for the seaside region known as Ponto have
mounted a campaign to get the city to dump the consultant it is
using to produce an environmental report.

"What we want to see is the best process …. even if it costs a
little bit more to produce the report," said attorney Todd Cardiff,
who represents homeowners Michael and Peggy Crowley.

"A fair and objective process," added Michael Crowley as the two
men stood on part of the undeveloped southern end of the Ponto
region near Batiquitos Lagoon on Thursday.

That's exactly what they will get with the current consulting
company, a city official responded.

"(RBF Consulting of Irvine) doesn't really have a financial
interest in whether the 'Ponto Vision Plan' gets accepted or not,"
said Debbie Fountain, the city's Housing and Redevelopment
Department director.

An employee with RBF Consulting said company officials could not
comment because under their contract with Carlsbad all media
questions must be referred to the city. Fountain said the
consultants are just contractors who are paid for the work they've
already done and not on whether the city ultimately decides to use
the plans they produce.

Crowley, who lives in the nearby San Pacifica housing
development, doesn't agree. He said his key reason for wanting the
city to get rid of RBF Consulting of Irvine is because it is the
same company that produced the Ponto plan -- the city's extremely
controversial, initial planning document for the 50-acre
region.

That plan calls for allowing several hotels, as well as
timeshare units and condominiums in the coastal region, which is
bordered by Ponto Drive to the north and Batiquitos Lagoon to the
south. In addition to producing that document, RBF Consulting also
drafted what's termed a "mitigated negative declaration" --
essentially a report stating that the Ponto plan didn't need a
full-scale environmental report because individual developers would
later produce their own environmental reports on their
projects.

Both the Ponto plan and the negative environmental document have
been the subject of several contentious city meetings, and the City
Council ordered the production of the full-scale, environmental
report last summer because of the controversy.

The report, which is expected to be done in late 2007, is
expected to cost $230,555.

Crowley and Cardiff said they learned late last month that the
city had hired the same consultant to do this job and they're not
happy.

"There's no checks and balances here," Crowley said, arguing
that the consulting company isn't likely now to produce an
environmental report that doesn't support the plan it produced
several years ago.

Fountain said Carlsbad officials completely disagree, noting
that the company has already been paid for its work on the earlier
document.

In addition, the people who work on this project probably won't
be the same people who worked on the earlier effort, she added. The
city's Ponto plan was a general planning document, while this
environmental report requires extensive biological documents that
likely will be farmed out to multiple subcontractors, she said.

Carlsbad received three bid proposals from companies seeking to
do the new environmental report, Fountain said. Each company was
reviewed by a team of city staff members to determine the its past
experience and its capacity to do this project, she said.

"RBF was the one that came out with the top score … they were
the clear choice," she said.